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How 80,000 People Became a Human Video Screen at the Super Bowl

PixMob created a human video screen for the Super Bowl half-time show.

Every attendee was given a hat to wear during half time. It was embedded with three LEDs and an infrared receiver.

Transmitters throughout the stadium beamed video content to the hats, which then lit up according to pre-determined software. This essentially turned every person into a pixel in a human video screen.

Testing the video installation in PixMob's headquarters before it broadcasted to millions.

Last night, as 80,000 people streamed into the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, they were handed a swag bag. Inside, among memorabilia and rosters was a basic black knitted cap that came with instructions telling the spectators to stick the hat on their head at the beginning of the halftime show.

If you watched the Super Bowl last night, you already know what happened during halftime. If you didn’t, the easiest way to describe it is to say the entire stadium essentially turned into a massive human video screen. Using infrared technology and embedded LEDs, every person in the audience became a single pixel in a stadium-sized screen that shimmered and blinked behind Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was a fantastic, if subtle, effect that prompted a little head-scratching. I mean, how the hell do you turn 80,000 rowdy football fans into a complex, human art installation?

“It takes a lot of technology,” said Vincent Leclerc, head of creations at PixMob, the company tasked with pulling the lighting show together. The Montreal-based technology company has produced immersive light shows for festivals and bands like Arcade Fire, Black Keys and Maroon 5. They might even be bringing a high-tech touch to the Winter Olympics (though they declined to confirm or deny this).

PixMob's job is to make performances interactive and immersive; they typically do this by embedding LEDs into objects that an audience interacts with. They’ve dropped LED-filled beach balls onto audiences, turned raving crowds into a pixelated mob with LED-fueled wristbands and set flight to swarms of firefly-like objects that shimmer over crowds.

In the case of the Super Bowl halftime show, PixMob embedded three LEDs and an infrared receiver into each stocking cap. The stadium was outfitted with 14 transmitters which beamed video onto the audience, almost like a matrix creating a virtual map. “We’re essentially dealing with invisible data,” Leclerc explained. Depending on a person's location, his or her hat’s receiver decoded the infrared signal differently, turning it into visible red, green or blue light to create the animated effects.

Leclerc compares it to an extremely low-res TV screen. “Eighty-thousand people sounds like a lot,” he said. “But when you look at it on a computer screen, 80,000 pixels is not much.” Though it would have been cool, this is why you didn’t see crisp, highly-detailed video feedback of Bruno Mars being reflected in the audience. Instead, PixMob used bright colors and bold movements to achieve their effects.

Maybe you've seen something vaguely similar. A few years ago, South Korea had a moment of YouTube fame when audiences at soccer games began choreographing precise movements to give the illusion of an animated human LCD screen. It was amazing despite, or rather because of, how low-tech it was. Leclerc points to the South Korean videos as a source of inspiration for PixMob's performance, though there's really no comparison, technologically-speaking. PixMob has been refining its new infrared technology for more than a year, and they’d been thinking about doing something like this since they started the company six years ago.

“Our ultimate goal was to do the Super Bowl,” Leclerc said. “And now we’re there.”